"Hell's gonna be so full of you Washington scum that there won't be any room left for anybody else."
Palladino was already preparing to wrap the deep gash on his arm. "Be still!" As he applied pressure to the wound with a large bandage, he barked at Pete, "I need a blanket, dammit. That's a towel."
Pete confidently trotted off again.
Bosely was working various syringes with extreme speed. "What happened here?"
The wounded soldier took a deep breath. "We received a tip ... that there was illegal ordnance somewhere in this building."
Palladino and Bosely's eyes briefly met. "Go on."
"We got airdropped in, but when we got here these punks were waiting for us."
"Do you know who they are?"
"No idea. Dusters, I guess. About ten of 'em."
"Five," Palladino corrected him.
"It felt like a hundred," the soldier said. "Before we could draw our weapons they were all over us."
Palladino grunted. The Advance South troops were notoriously inept, but this was a pitiful low. How they were still able to score these knockout punches against the highly trained military powers of America was beyond him. He finished with the bandage just as Bosely injected him with a high-load tetanus shot. Pete returned again. This time he was carrying a thick blanket and a pillow.
Palladino took the items from the DAT. "Thanks, son. Good job." Pete sat down on his haunches next to the wounded AS soldier and watched. Palladino placed the pillow behind the soldier's back and draped the blanket over his legs. "Are you feeling cold or sleepy?"
"No." The young man was staring at the DAT, his eyes as big as saucers.
"That's not real, is it?" the injured soldier finally asked.
"No. You're having hallucinations."
The soldier nodded. "I thought so," he muttered to himself. He tried to look around. "Can you check on my team? I know it's not your job ... "
"They're all fine," Bosely lied to him. "Just relax. We're going to try to reach the rest of your unit and let them know that you're here. Okay?"
"Sure, sure. 'Preciate it."
Palladino spoke to Pete. "Please lay down beside ... what's your name, son?"
"Andrew."
"Please lay down beside Andrew." Peter lay down within kissing distance of the trembling soldier. "Don't worry. He won't hurt you." Palladino pressed a tiny button on Peter's neck and a high-res fourteen-centimeter color monitor revealed itself in a recessed compartment in his ribcage. After a few seconds, the Yahoo splash screen bloomed and artificial light filled the room, giving it some comfort.
Andrew drew back, utterly amazed. "You've got the Internet!"
"Better." Palladino thumbed another button. "We've got HBO, the History Channel, ESPN, you name it."
In spite of his intense discomfort, Andrew was laughing. "Oh, man. If I wasn't seeing this, I wouldn't believe it."
"Well, you aren't seeing this." Bosely twirled a finger at his own temple. "Crazy, remember?"
Andrew grinned. "Right." Then his freckled face contorted in pain.
"You like sports?" Palladino asked.
"Um, yeah."
"We've got college football, soccer, hockey—"
"Hockey? Who's playing?"
Palladino stared at the action on the screen. "Looks like the Red Wings and the Sharks."
"Yeah, yeah. Should be a good game. Thanks." Tears formed at the corners of his eyes. "Now all I need is a beer and a pizza."
Bosely held up another syringe. "How about another shot of morphine?"
Andrew quickly nodded. "That'll work, too."
Palladino fished his mobile phone out of one pocket and asked the operator for the number of the Advance South headquarters in Saint Louis, Missouri. There were three listed. He chose the first. He dialed the number and reached a sleepy receptionist who connected him with her supervisor who gave him the number of a private residence. He told the man who answered the phone that he was a concerned citizen of East Saint Louis and that he had come across an ambushed Advance South unit. At first the man did not believe him. It wasn't until Palladino began reading off the names from the dead soldiers' dog tags that belief—or rather disbelief—set in. With a sudden dullness in his voice, the other man said that he would take care of the matter. Palladino advised him to do so with high speed as the building where the soldiers were was a designated target scheduled for immediate demolition.
"You're from Washington?" the man asked.
"Yes," Palladino answered.
The other man breathed heavily on his end of the line. "Well, thanks for the call. Give us twenty minutes. And be gone when we get there."
"Will do." Palladino clicked off.
He rejoined the others and whispered to Bosely, "They're gonna be here in twenty." He looked at Andrew, who now had his good arm curled around Pete's neck. "How's he doing?"
"He's not having that much pain," Bosely whispered back. "So that's good. You think it's a good idea to have exposed the DAT like this?"
"I'll bet he's lost two quarts of blood. If this guy lives to watch the eleven o'clock news tonight it will be a miracle. Look, we're moving on. Can you go back downstairs and stand watch? Call Smith and give him a status report. I'll give him the green light on the timers at twenty-one hundred hours. That's fourteen minutes from now. Then we'll all meet back at the truck."
Bosely frowned. "Fourteen minutes? The AS team may not have gotten here by that time."
"I know. We're going to delay the timing devices by one hour. Tell Clayton and Smith. That's the best we can do."
Bosely paused. "Clambake's bushwackers might be listening in on us. Maybe we should stay off the radios until we get clear?"
"Mention it to Clayton. Maybe he can rig one of the AIs to be a jammer."
"Okay." Bosely tapped Andrew on the leg. "You take it easy, young man."
"Thanks." The young man seemed genuinely grateful. "And thanks for letting me talk to your dog."
Bosely's left eyebrow went up quizzically. "Oh, is he talking now?"
"Well, yeah." The soldier gave Pete a fuzzy look. "Didn't you just tell me that you wanted some ice cream?"
The DAT's comm screen lit up. "No."
"Oh, I'm sorry. Maybe that was me ... . " He coughed once, slumped backwards, and closed his eyes.
Bosely left. Palladino fetched another dark blanket, pulled the body of the female soldier from under the couch, and covered it. He did the same for the other three murdered soldiers on the kitchen floor. He checked his watch. It was twenty-one hundred hours exactly. He radioed Clayton.
"Set timers for twenty-two hundred hours. I repeat: twenty-two hundred hours. Do you copy?"
"Copy that," came Clayton's reply, full of static. "Meet you at the truck. Over."
Palladino hoisted his backpack over one shoulder and addressed Pete. "Let's go."
The DAT removed Andrew's arm from around his neck with a slow, deliberate motion. The LED lettering on his forehead was amped in the uneven light of the apartment. "There is too much death here.
"No argument there. But this is war. Death happens."
"There was a war in this room?" Peter asked.
"Yes. A small war."
"And everyone has to cause death to someone else in a war?"
"No. Not always."
"But those HCs caused death to the soldiers, and you caused death to happen to the HCs."
"Pete, we had to stop those HCs from hurting that soldier and possibly others. That was a tactical decision to save lives, not just to cause death."
"No. That is incorrect. You did not allow the HCs time to talk about their plans to hurt others."
"Look, I don't have time to argue with you!"
The DAT broke off contact and looked prepared to engage in a meaningful stare-off with a nearby lava lamp when Palladino yanked hard on his flak jacket. "We have to get out of here. Now COME ON!" He half-dragged him down the four flights of stairs.
Within five minutes everyone was safely back i
nside the semi's trailer with Smith behind the wheel this time. Palladino sat beside him, his machine gun resting between his knees. Just as they were pulling out onto the blank street, six parachutes appeared in the skies directly overhead.
"It's Advance South. Let's move it!"
Smith kicked the recalcitrant behemoth into fourth gear and nosed it around a broad corner. With two more turns, they were now headed east. Highway 203 was still several kilometers away, but now they would be driving instead of walking.
"What time is it?" Smith asked.
Palladino checked his watch. "Civilian time: nine-thirty p.m."
"Good. We'll be home free by eleven."
The huge tenement buildings gave way to large, single-family homes with manicured lawns. Here the streets were well lit and the parked cars relatively new and intact. But everyone knew that honest danger still leered at them from every corner. In this area were the people left behind when the city's more mobile upper middle class had drained across the Mississippi river and into St. Louis, Missouri. Playing hosts to dangerous drug cartels probably filled several needs: drugs, food, fast money and daily gang battles. In spite of the natural disasters and the war itself, many citizens still found themselves spellbound by the desire to witness destruction. Hollywood wasn't around anymore to pump out mindless action-gore fests to the masses, and so this need had to be met in a more organic way. Many communities like this one now experienced head-cracking violence right in their front yards, and the intel was that it was being encouraged outright by some community leaders. Fantasy had evolved into exquisite reality in the blink of an adrenaline-addled eye. Many people in once thriving suburbs were now gunfight junkies, waiting with trembling hands behind their living room drapes for